§ Mr. LeslieTo ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what progress has been made on making car fronts safer and controlling bull bars. [133245]
§ Mr. Hill"Tomorrow's Roads—Safer for Everyone", our road safety strategy, commits the UK to backing proposals for the European Commission to bring forward a Directive to make car fronts safer. The Government believe that a pedestrian protection Directive could ultimately secure a reduction in deaths and serious injuries to pedestrians of up to 20 per cent.
The Government also said in the road safety strategy that such a Directive would be the best way of preventing particularly dangerous bull bars being fitted to vehicles. As a part of our consideration of how best to tackle bull bars, we asked the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) to do some test work comparing a range of typical bull bars and base vehicles. TRL's report on this is being published today and copies have been put in the House Library.
In summary, TRL recommend that an approval procedure for bull bars should be considered, with a test speed of 40km/h (25mph). They warn against a low speed test, which is the best we could demand in any national approval scheme. We believe this confirms our view that controls on bull bars should be introduced on a Europe-wide basis. TRL's research is a thorough piece of work, and their initial findings have enabled us to submit a technical proposal to the European Commission setting out how bull bars could be dealt with in the anticipated pedestrian protection Directive.
The Government do, however, recognise that there is a desire for action to be taken as quickly as possible. We have therefore also submitted a comparable technical proposal for amending the 'existing' external projections Directive to include a test for bull bars, as a quick interim measure. This second proposal was well received by other member states when it was initially tabled in early June, and we hope it will make swift progress.